Sandy Hook teacher to be guest of second lady at State of the Union

Kaitlin Roig, who is credited with helping to save the lives of 15 of her first-grade students by hiding them in a bathroom during the Dec. 14 shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, will be a special guest at tonight’s State of the Union address in Washington, D.C.

The 29-year-old Greenwich resident will join Tim Cook, who took the helm of Apple after the death of Steve Jobs, and about 20 other honorees in a box in the gallery of the U.S. House chamber for President Obama’s prime-time speech that is expected to amplify the call for stricter gun control laws.

Roig declined to comment further about the massacre, which took the lives of 20 children age 7 and under, as well as six female educators.

In in interview with Diane Sawyer of ABC News in December, a tearful Roig shared her tale of heroism and described the terrifying moments inside the school’s bathroom.

“I put one of my students on top of the toilet,” Roig said. “I just knew we had to get in there. I told them we had to be absolutely quiet. I said there are bad guys out there now. We have to wait for the good guys.”

Roig told Sawyer that she tried to comfort the children like a parent, even though she was frightened for their lives.

“So I’m hearing the gunfire in the hallway. I’m thinking we’re next,” Roig said. “So I said to them, ‘I need you to know that I love you all very much and that it’s going to be OK,’ because I thought that was the last thing that they were ever going to hear. I thought we were all going to die.”

Roig is a graduate of the University of Connecticut, where she received a master’s degree from the Neag School of Education.

At Sandy Hook School, she started a running club for third- and fourth-graders called Marathon Mondays and plans to compete in the New York City Marathon this year.